Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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AMSTERDAM (JTA)-Two weeks ago, a 29-year-old man waving a Palestinian flag smashed the windows of a kosher restaurant with a wooden club, stealing an Israeli flag there. Police arrested the suspect on the spot The Dec. 7 incident, which occurred the day after President Donald Trump declared that the United States officially recognizes Jerusalem as Israel's capital, triggered an outpouring of condemnations by Dutch leaders. Prime Minister Mark Rutte called it "terrible," and 15 lawmakers ate...
PARIS (JTA)-When Jerry Levy's family opened one of the first gourmet kosher meat shops in France, they had some of the country's best-laid business plans. Hailing from a long line of Jewish butchers in their native Algeria, they had the expertise and diligence in 1977 to cater to the changing needs of their growing community, where tens of thousands of Jewish immigrants from North Africa like them were developing both the appetite for quality-and the means to pay for it. Four decades on, the...
AMSTERDAM (JTA)-Henny Goudeketting, a 95-year-old Holocaust survivor, is ailing and preparing to leave the world. Goudeketting, who was sterilized in Nazi medical experiments at Auschwitz, has neither children nor other relatives to care for her. Now, after multiple infections and recurrent falls, she's readying to say goodbye. "It's kind of strange," Goudeketting told JTA. "I know I have no future and I'm ready to die, but I'm still afraid of actually dying." The Amsterdam native returned to...
BUDAPEST (JTA)-At a conference about anti-Semitism in Europe, senior Hungarian officials said the absence of violence against Jews in their country owed to its refusal to admit Muslim immigrants. The assertion, which at least one Jewish expert on anti-Semitism disputed, came amid criticism of Prime Minister Viktor Orban's right-wing government by other European leaders of his immigration policy, and a dispute between the Hungarian leader and some Jewish community leaders who accuse Orban of...
(JTA)-The sight of far-right activists waving racist banners and shouting anti-Semitic slogans during a nationalist march in the capital of Poland over the weekend shocked many around the world. It was an understandable reaction to witnessing tens of thousands in Warsaw marching near what used to be the largest Jewish ghetto during the Holocaust amid shouts of "Jews out" and "Remove Jewry from power." The march, an annual event that began in 2009 with 500 participants on Poland's national day,...
(JTA)-Of all the many loaded issues tied to the bloody history of Jews in the former Soviet Union, none is as sensitive today in that part of the world as their role in the 1917 revolution that brought the communists to power. The outsized prevalence of Jews in the ranks of the revolution that broke out a century ago on Nov. 7 has remained a mainstay of anti-Semitic vitriol in the area. During the Holocaust, it served as a pretext for the murder of countless Jews across Eastern Europe by...
(JTA)-The time is just after the defeat of Nazi Germany. Two Orthodox Jews disembark from a train at a rural station in Soviet-occupied Hungary and, after offloading a heavy bag, they begin a silent, hour-long walk to a nearby village. The purpose of their journey is not known. But their arrival in the village sets in motion a series of tragic and violent events, as some residents worry the visitors will expose crimes they committed during the Nazi occupation, with potentially deadly...
COIMBRA, Portugal (JTA)-From its mountaintop perch, the University of Coimbra towers majestically over the downtown square that used to be the regional headquarters of the Portuguese Inquisition. It's a fitting location for the 737-year-old university, the seventh oldest in the world, which outsmarted and outlived the campaign of persecution against Jews and freethinkers unleashed by the Catholic Church and Portugal's rulers in 1536. "This place was almost literally an ivory tower of knowledge...
(JTA)-A plan to open a mosque in a heavily Jewish area of London is dividing British Jews, with some calling the development worrisome and others accusing its opponents of racism. The Islamic center is slated to open next month at the Hippodrome, a former concert hall in the heart of the north London neighborhood of Golders Green. The area is home to thousands of Jewish families of all major denominations and many synagogues, Jewish schools, kosher shops and restaurants, even hotels for devout...
BUCHAREST, Romania (JTA)-When the roof of the Jewish State Theater collapsed during a 2014 snowstorm, its director reluctantly knew it was finally time to abandon the century-old building in this capital city. Maia Morgenstern did not take the decision lightly. Following years of neglect by authorities, the Bucharest Jewish community had fought for decades to keep the storied theater afloat. The Jewish State Theater had been a major cultural institution for Central European Jews prior to the...
(JTA)-After 70 years of studying the Holocaust, historians still don't know the exact circumstances of the tragic fate that befell two of the best-known victims of the Holocaust era: Anne Frank and Raoul Wallenberg. Frank, the teenager whose journal of her days in hiding from the Nazis in Amsterdam has sensitized millions to the suffering of 6 million victims, died in 1945 in Bergen-Belsen after the Nazis caught her. But nobody knows who, if anyone, betrayed her and her family to the Nazis....
PARIS (JTA)-In a bid to preserve interest in the Holocaust by future generations, the Basel-based Anne Frank Foundation unveiled the first authorized comic book based on the teenager's famous diary written in hiding from the Nazis in Amsterdam. The 148-page adaptation, which was published Sept. 18 in France and in some 40 languages worldwide, was presented to journalists in the French capital Sept. 7 by the graphic diary's illustrator, David Polonsky from Israel, and its writer, the Israeli...
(JTA)—A chuckle tickled my throat as Ruth Thomann, a Swiss hotelier who posted signs urging her “Jewish guests” to shower before entering the pool, assured me that she has “nothing against Jews.” To be clear, I don’t find racism particularly amusing, especially not these days. But there was something comical about how her earnest voice—she was speaking in broken English with a thick Swiss-German accent—contrasted with the glaringly discriminatory character of the laminated signs that she posted in her Paradise Apartments in Arosa hotel nea...
(JTA)—Commenting on deadly attacks in Catalonia, the chief rabbi of that region in Spain said his community is doomed, partly because of radical Islam and the alleged reluctance of authorities to confront it. Rabbi Meir Bar-Hen has been encouraging his congregants to leave Spain, which he called during an interview with JTA a “hub of Islamist terror for all of Europe,” for years before the attacks Thursday and Friday, he said. At least 13 victims and five suspected terrorists were killed in Barcelona and the resort town of Cambrils, 75 miles...
AMSTERDAM (JTA)-In a country where sex toys are displayed in shop windows and television commercials often feature nudity, a picture of a clothed, heterosexual couple kissing may not seem like the stuff of scandal. But precisely such an image-part of a poster campaign celebrating diversity in the Netherlands-has triggered acrimonious debate, charges of racism, acts of vandalism and even threats by those who found it offensive. The reason: The women pictured in a series of posters were wearing...
WESTERBORK, Netherlands (JTA)-Nothing about the footage that Rudolf Breslauer filmed here on May 30, 1944, suggests that it was taken inside one of Europe's largest Nazi concentration camps. In the film by Breslauer, a German-Jewish inmate of the Westerbork camp in Holland's northeast, prisoners are seen playing soccer enthusiastically in team uniforms, complete with a referee in a special outfit. A middle-aged man wearing a suit and a boy who may have been his grandson stroll cheerfully in the...
(JTA)-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shelved a controversial bill that would have made the haredi Orthodox-dominated Chief Rabbinate the only body authorized by the government to perform conversions in Israel. Netanyahu's office announced Friday that the legislation will not be considered for six months while a "team" he will appoint comes up with recommendations for an "arrangement" on the issue. The decision comes after an outcry by the Reform and Conservative movements and American Jewish...
AMSTERDAM (JTA)-Livraria Ets Haim is the world's oldest functioning Jewish library. As such, it is no stranger to the prospect of imminent destruction. Founded in 1616 by Jews who fled Catholic persecution in Spain and Portugal, the three-room library is adjacent to Amsterdam's majestic Portuguese Synagogue in the Dutch capital's center. The 30,000-volume collection mostly contains manuscripts written by people who fled the Inquisition on the Iberian Peninsula or their descendants. The oldest...
(JTA)-Nearly 50 years after she left her native South Africa for Britain to escape apartheid, Sharon Klaff again is finding herself unable to imagine a future for her family in her country and society because of racism. And this time, the problem is hitting nearer to home, said Klaff, 69, a yoga teacher and Jewish mother of two. Troubled by the Labour Party's recent electoral successes despite its perceived failure to tackle anti-Semitic vitriol in its ranks, Klaff felt even more concerned...
(JTA)-Before he threw Sarah Halimi to her death from a window of her third-story apartment in Paris, 27-year-old Kobili Traore called his Jewish neighbor "Satan" and cried out for Allah. These and other facts about the April 4 incident that shocked French Jewry are known from testimonies and a recording made by a neighbor, according to the National Bureau for Vigilance Against Anti-Semitism watchdog. Years before the attack, Traore called a daughter of his 65-year-old victim, whom he beat...
(JTA)-On a recent Sunday, eight far-right activists filmed themselves on what they called a "raid" on the Aurora Jewish community center in Budapest. Sporting crewcuts and black clothes, the men affixed posters with a crossed-out picture of the Hungary-born Jewish American billionaire George Soros to the entrance of the building, which along with having a Masorti, or Conservative, synagogue, also serves as the headquarters for a gay rights group, a Roma advocacy lobby, a hotline for immigrants...
(JTA)-Britain's bloodiest terrorist attack in over a decade occurred Monday just two miles from Rabbi Yisroel Cohen's synagogue. Yet one day after the deadly bombing in Manchester, Cohen told JTA he has no intention of changing security arrangements at his congregation. In fact Cohen, a Chabad emissary who works in a Jewish enclave in the northern part of the city surrounded by a heavily Muslim area, said there is little room for improving security across his tight-knit community. After all, the...
AMSTERDAM (JTA)-Shortly after the outbreak of the Six-Day War in 1967, Ronny Naftaniel was soliciting donations on the street and putting a lot of money into a box emblazoned with the words "for Israel." An Amsterdam Jew who was 19 that year, Naftaniel was one of many pro-Israel activists across Western Europe who collected the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of dollars from individuals supportive of Israel in its fight against Arab neighbors who were widely perceived as the more powerful...
PARIS (JTA)-French Jews may have voted en masse for Emmanuel Macron in the final round of France's presidential elections, but that doesn't make him their dream president. Like many other supporters of the 39-year-old former investment banker, who on Sunday became the youngest French president in recent history, Jews voted for Macron mainly to block his far-right opponent, Marine Le Pen. The centrist won with 65 percent of the vote to 34 percent for Le Pen. Leaders of French Jewry said they...
AMSTERDAM (JTA)—Decades after her death at a Nazi concentration camp, Anne Frank’s restless spirit in heaven finally finds a soulmate in Zef Bunga, an Albanian teenager who was murdered in a revenge killing. Anne, whose world-famous diary recounts her two years in hiding from the Nazis in Amsterdam with her family, falls in love with the Muslim boy. They kiss and they commiserate and bond over the injustice of their early deaths—Zef in the 1990s in Tirana, Anne in 1945 in the Bergen-Belsen Nazi concentration camp. This original take on the A...
